Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood

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Big deal today.

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We can't... We're, you know, come on.
We're one of the best podcasts in in the world And we can't get better fucking noisemakers This is unbelievable We can make noises, boys We can just make noises Mine's sick Happy 600 The goddamn poppers don't work either Everything's falling apart I feel like I'm in a Wow. Great.
Don't be scared after we got shooters running around. This is exactly what we need.
Smells like gunpowder in this room. Yes, it does.
Smells like my bathroom. Did you know I packed my ass full of gunpowder just to make my poo-poos more explosive? How? Revolutionary.
Welcome to episode 600 of Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks.
I'm here with Henry Zebrowski. I'm in my feelings today.
I'm in my feelings Henry Zebrowski. Why is that? Because this story is a story that we've danced around over the years and it's come up back and forth, but for number 600, the mystery begins.
Goddamn right. And we've got the tightly packed Ed Larson with us today.
Man, there is no more room in my body. The skin is tight.
And today, the story we're going to be covering, the Black Dahlia murder, the most vicious crime to hit Los Angeles since the babes of Inglewood in 1937. Or maybe since we made this city out of nothing, built it upon nightmares that you thought were dreams.
You know, there was like full on like a weird inquisition around here. Yeah.
They all said, he did all of around here yeah well let's fucking jump right into this shit because i cannot wait i love this story so much and it's gonna be a fucking journey ladies and gentlemen this is a story that really like gets the hairs on which is a lot yeah i'm standing on the back of my... It's the carpet of your back.
Yes, it stands. I'm growing two times the size

I am normally... chairs which is a lot yeah i'm standing on the back of the carpet of your back yes it stands i'm growing two times the size i am normal i'm turning into a calico cat but this story i don't know what the hell it is about at this time and i think it's because of all of the david lynch i have consumed over all the years that since we have gotten to this point, Twin Peaks season three, this whole storyline, I did not realize is essentially fire walk with me.
Yeah. Yeah.
This is an extraordinarily Lynchian tale. And it's frightening.
There's something very spooky about the mystery around Elizabeth Short. It reminds me a lot of the Elisa Lam story.
It also reminds me of JonBenet Ramsey quite This is one of the most famous murders of all time, correct? Sure. It's been American.
How come you haven't covered it yet? Well, we're going to get into that in just a second. So on January 15th, 1947, the viciously mutilated corpse of a beautiful young woman named Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot in the Lamer Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Within weeks, she would become known as the Black Dahlia, and her murder would remain one of the most infamous unsolved cases in American history. That gum you like is coming back in style.
Now this is a little out of character for us us because we don't often cover unsolved cases.

But what if I told you that Elizabeth Short's murder was, in fact, all but solved and has been for almost 75 years now? If you're on Reddit, you're probably like, no, I know the reason. I know exactly what it is and you don't know anything.
So that's probably what they would say. What if I told you that for very good reason, the most likely suspect was swept under the rug and has stayed there, despite a mountain of evidence pointing towards his guilt? I would say, like and subscribe, please.
Well, over the course of this series, we're definitely going to be getting deep into the who, amongst the garden of who's. But who really isn't the big question here.
I mean, for some people it is. For me, it is.
I mean, that's the whole reason we're doing it. But also at the same time, you know, it's not, if it's already solved and it's not, this is Marcus's like realm of understanding.
It was her father. The big question is why Elizabeth Short was murdered.
And more importantly, how many people were involved before, during, and after. To try and answer that question, we're going to spend the next three episodes taking a tour through 1940s Los Angeles.
Get out of here, missy. You should have been a man.
The people, the papers, the movie industry, the mob, and of course, the biggest gang of them all, the LAPDs. Oh, yes.
Someone made a comment about the Chicago gangsters versus the police. We're like, in Chicago, we pay off the cops and the gangsters do the job.
In Los Angeles, the police are the gangsters. Yeah, the hat squad.
We're also going to cover a myriad of theories concerning who killed Elizabeth Short. All of them have a degree of plausibility, but in the end, there really is, in my own personal opinion, only one suspect worthy of serious consideration.
Serious consideration. That, however, begs the question as to why this man's name isn't right up there with some of the most famous murderers in history.
Why his name hasn't become a byword for overkill. Because if you're not familiar with the Black Dahlia murder at all, it really is one of the absolute worst America has to offer.
And that's saying something. I mean, we love killing people who come out West.
Basically, you see, do you really want it? Do you really want to be in a Colgate commercial? But to answer that question, it all has to do with the hypothesis I have. I think that people actually like the Black Dahlia murder better as a mystery that will remain unsolved for all eternity.
although the reasons why people want it to remain mysterious differ from person to person. From one perspective, if the case remains unsolved, Elizabeth Short, with her almost movie star face and complicated erratic backstory, she becomes an almost romantic, even angelic figure that beat generation's wandering sacrificial lamb laid out like an art installation in the middle of the city of dreams.
I will say in the last couple of days that I've been spending very closely with Elizabeth Short, I would say I would have let her destroy my ever living life. She would have definitely been the exact type of woman I would have met in 1940s Los Angeles and said, Oh, you want to go to San Diego? Let's go.
Like it would have been very quick for me. She was like the first suicide girl.
Yeah. Well, to the point of her beauty, the very name the press gave to the crime that killed her, the Black Dahlia murder, makes it sound almost ethereal, like a song or a poem.
But if you introduce a suspect into this story, the beauty fades along with the romance. It's no longer the Black Dahlia murder.
It's now the story of the Black Dahlia killer, which places Elizabeth Short's death firmly in the grubby world of true crime with no escape. Yeah, then she's just some murdered lady.
There is, however, an opposing perspective here that has nothing to do with romantic notions.

Instead, the Black Dahlia murder,

often considered one of the most gruesome

crime scenes in history, can also

be seen as a cautionary tale

of a girl who, in the words of many

people at the time, reaped what

she sowed. And then they can keep

cutting back to that cautionary tale

any time they like.

Because that's what happens when you come to Los Angeles. See, Elizabeth Short, just 22 when she died, lived an unconventional life for 1947.
She was a drifter of sorts from Massachusetts who just sort of ended up in and out of Southern California, a kid who didn't or couldn't buy into the conventions of post-World War II America. And this is going to ask the audience the same question that Forrest Gump asks.

Do you know what love is?

Because she reminds me of Jenny.

She reminds me of Jenny.

And yet, Jenny, now if you look upon it with hindsight,

Jenny's character is complicated.

Oh, absolutely.

A nightmare.

She ruined him.

But at the same time, Jenny's the most beautiful name of her. She did give him something to do in the end of his life.
That's it. She provided tasks, which is the most important thing for a woman to do for a man.
Well, as a consequence, Elizabeth Short became an example of what could happen if you stepped outside the boundaries that society had drawn for the average American woman in 1947. Put another way, people could make a stark comparison with no middle ground using Elizabeth Short's murder.
You're either the girl that was found bisected in a vacant lot or you're the happy housewife who lives in the home built on top of the crime scene. Which I have visited and they don't like visitors.
They're really not super friendly about it. They don't want to talk to you about it because apparently they got nothing to do with the crime anymore.
And they're really angry that you keep kind of bringing it up even though it's one of the most famous pieces of true crime on the face of the planet. You bought the ticket.
Take the ride, man.

See, they still are like, but this is my house that I purchased.

It's my property.

And I'm all like.

I'm a true crime podcaster, bro.

I have different rules.

Yeah.

I don't feel any guilt for them.

No, I don't feel guilt.

Guilt is not what I feel.

I'm just telling you what to expect.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In reality, though, Elizabeth Short was neither of these extremes.
As reporter Jimmy Richardson put it, Elizabeth Short wasn't bad, but she wasn't necessarily good either. She was just lost.
A person trying to find a way out. A wanderer who bounced around the country in search of happiness and purpose.
In other words, Elizabeth Short was as human as they come. And this also was at a time period where people believed that that search of happiness and purpose made you an idler, made you a useless member of society.
Yeah. And that you're, even though it's baked into the G.D.
Constitution, this idea of a pursuit of happiness, that the idea that then, yeah, sure, you're legally and freedom allowed. According to freedom, you're allowed to do it.
But you should actually be pregnant right now. And so I think all of society, when you look at somebody like Elizabeth Short, I view her very, very empathetically because she just didn't necessarily want to be a mom and a housewife.
She wanted to go out and just do whatever the fucking would do whatever life was going to take you. And unfortunately, it took her to a vacant lot in Culver City.
Or so we assume. That's the thing.
We actually don't know a lot about Elizabeth Short's actual motivations, a lot about what she really wanted out of life. We're not really sure.
We can just piece together things from what people who knew her said. She's 22.
And when I was 22, I just, my only goal was to stay alive. Yeah.
It didn't work for her. But in this tale, there is also a bevy of inhumanity.
That savagery lies in the method of her murder and the likely motivations behind it. A story that's filled with a thousand questions about who did what, when, where, and why.
So we're not allowed to play the sound cue anymore because they've decided to make Joy monetize. But just now, before we get into this episode,

I think it's really important for you to shut off all the lights in your home. You got to put on that.
If you don't have the Lost Highway soundtrack, you go get that shit. Oh, my God.
It's so good. Llorando.
Llorando. Llorando.
And this is the time to sedway into allow the mystery to take over. David Lynch, this story is central to David Lynch's entire artistic oeuvre.
Oh, no. This entire episode is scored by Angelo Badalamente.
Like at certain points, just like in your mind, just think. It's so, I don't know what it is.
This time, this story fucking creeped me out.

But to help answer all of our questions,

we used three sources.

The Black Dahlia Files by Donald Wolf.

Black Dahlia Red Rose by Pew Marie Eatwell.

And Black Dahlia Avenger, colon.

A Genius for Murder, colon.

The True Story, colon.

Part One by Steve Hodel.

There's a lot of perspectives out there. I just also remember, oh, I want you also, we've watched the movies.
I've went and watched whatever documentary footage I could find. And there is so much bullshit that has been jammed into this story over the years.
It is so hard to figure out what is real and what is not real. Because there was that big bombshell Apple podcast that came out a couple of years ago that I believe that was called...
Black Talia? Noi. No! Man, I watched the Brian De Palma movie to prep for this.
And it has nothing to do with the story. Absolutely.
It's another podcast called Root of Evil that tells the entire story from the perspective of the Hodel family which is also we don't know if that's real or not and that takes it entirely that side and say this is the only way that guy could be the killer of the Black Dahlia we're going to see this a lot so be patient with us dear listener we're going to get to your favorite theory at some point we're going to talk about it and you just need to know that your favorite theory might not be the number one. But we'll find out, won't we? It might not be the theory that we subscribe to, but you know what? That's okay.
That's called opinion. So on the morning of January 15th, 1947, a woman named Betty Bursinger and her three-year-old child were walking through the half-finished neighborhood of Leimert Park, a small neighborhood in Los Angeles that was still dotted with grassy vacant lots waiting for a home to be built on top.
But as Betty and her daughter strolled down the 3800 block of South Norton Avenue, she noticed broken glass on the sidewalk and a large black cloud of flies buzzing over what seemed to be two separate objects lying just off the footpath. Mommy, I want to go in the field.
I want to play with the flies. Mommy, let me go in the field.
I want to meet the devil. Mommy, I heard flies announce the coming of the devil.
I told you. I told you, Scotty Jr., you can meet the devil when you commit suicide.
I'm going to eat the flies. I told you, we have flies at home.
These are better. These are covered in blood.
Oh, no, we can't go over there. That's evident.
Now, when Betty got closer, she

thought, perhaps unable to fully process

the site before her, that someone

had cut a mannequin in half

and thrown it on the grass. She

thought it was a mannequin because the objects

were porcelain white.

Her first concern, however,

was this unsettling sight might

frighten some of the kids playing in the nearby

park. I want to play with the dead woman's open wounds!

No, Scotty Jr., I told you, we have dead woman wounds at all!

I want the neck!

So, she decided to call the city to see if someone could come do something about this mess in the vacant lot.

She knocked on the door of a nearby house, reported what she saw, and went about her day,

Shop for free. do something about this mess in the vacant lot.
She knocked on the door of a nearby house, reported what she saw, and went about her day, shopping at the mall while one of the most enduring mysteries in true crime history unfolded in that lonely vacant lot. Now, around 1107 a.m., after a second bystander who processed the crime scene a little more thoroughly called the police, something horrible was laying in a vacant lot in lemerritt park the first policeman showed up on the scene their first reaction was to shout holy hell someone's cut this girl right in half you know i've been waiting to say that myself you can right now Eddie.
Holy hell, someone cut this woman in half. No, he's a girl.
A woman can vote. Holy hell, someone cut this girl in half.
Yeah, let me go. Let me try.
Let me try. Let me try.
Holy hell, someone's cut this girl in half. Less happy.
Oh, I thought I was announcing it's in the neighborhood. Holy hell, someone's cut this girl in half less happy oh i thought i was announcing it's in the neighborhood holy hell someone's cut this girl right and let me get my ruler exactly half well that exclamation drew dozens of people from cops to reporters to simple bystanders all of whom got a good long look at the sort of gore that a lot of these men had hoped they'd left behind in Europe and the South Pacific just a few years prior.
Now we'll get into more details as our story progresses, but what those people saw that morning is as follows. A smorgasbord of such horror that it's hard to decide where to start, but for the sake of the story, let's start with the first thing the police noticed, the bisection of the body.
The naked corpse, belonging to a young white woman with reddish, light brown hair, had been neatly cut in half about midway up her belly, what you'd call the true waist, just under her ribs. It was perfectly cut between the vertebrae as well, so it would not have scored any of the various organs that would have been there in the first place.
So it probably was done by somebody who's done it before. You know, I just found out about the true waist, you know, because I like wearing my pants below my belt, below my belly and stuff.
And they're like, oh, I think I have a 36. But they're like, no, no, no.
No, you're 49. You're way fatter.
I was like, no, this is my waist. Like, that's not your waist.
That's the thing. But no one tells fat guys this.
I have four waists. I have my main, what I consider my youth waist, which is pinching my fat around where my belly button is, right in order for my pants is there, because my belly is inherently soft, right? But then I have my top, top top waist which is right under my tits yeah which i will eventually get to but i do i should have i should be killing some communists in a war somewhere first but then you have the under the belly waist which is the best one but that's only that when it's 70 then i get the suspenders over the waist through my shoulders.

And once the suspenders are involved, fourth waist becomes the shoulders, which is where the pants do indeed lie, because that's where the weight of the suspenders is. That's great.
Finally, this is how he keeps his pants up, people. It's a science.
It takes a village, a whole team. the torso had been laid out on the ground about a foot above the legs But it had been deliberately placed to the left of the corpse's bottom half With a line on the outside of the right leg Ran up to the line on the left side of her torso In other words, the two sections were deliberately placed Crime scene as a of art.
The less artistically minded of eyewitnesses, however, described the placement as though two hunks of human flesh had been laid down like two sides of beef. As for the victim's arms, they were extended and posed above her head like a discarded marionette, as one of the first reporters to write about the corpse put it, and her wrists,

ankles, and neck were marked with deep rope burns. Her right breast was also missing, but just the right, as were many of her organs.
The liver, however, was intact and hung slack from the bottom of the bisected torso. But perhaps most gruesome of all, her face had been beaten and mutilated, her lips and cheeks carved out to give her the appearance of a wide, gaping grin.
And I want to say thank you, Marcus, for sending me all the pictures, because I was looking online. I couldn't find the proper uncensored pictures of the body, because I want to look at it.
I had them. I think it's important.
And I was really thankful because Marcus went to his books that he had them in and he took pictures of them and sent them to me. And then I got a really fun iPhone album picture album that they just sent to the top of my, like literally where it's just like memories from like- Laleigh 42.
Yeah, yeah. And it's just a set to like show Pete Pukas no reason.
You know, they chose a song, some random song. It's just like, it's a short.
Yeah, I think, wow, that's what it fucking is. And then they got, it's just this, her pictures of her corpse just rolling through.
So, thanks, Apple. I appreciate you not sending me the pictures, by the way.
I'll send them to you later. I'll send them to you in an album.
I'm actually going to get them printed. Put them in my pillowcases like you used to do in college.
What we're going to do is we're going to include them in our new advertising partner, StoryWorth. Tell us a story of all different types of your home and your family.
You can put any sorts of pictures from the morgue in there that you want. You can add whatever you want to it.

That's the point.

I didn't realize her organs were missing.

Some of them.

Really?

Did they ever find them?

No.

So they might have been sold.

Maybe they weren't doing that.

No, they weren't sold.

No, no, they weren't.

I'm just trying to make some money here.

Her organs were gone and her bass drum couldn't be found either.

Hey!

Now, it was immediately obvious. Hell yeah, be sad.
Yeah, man, be super sad about that one. Fucking put your, leave those hands on your face and shame for the rest of the fucking episode.
Just be in my little corner. Now, it was immediately obvious that this person had been killed elsewhere, not just because of the time it would take to mutilate someone like this out in the open without someone seeing, but because there was very little blood on the grass.
In fact, the body had been completely drained of blood in addition to being washed or soaked in water. The grass was still damp under the body, meaning someone had placed it between midnight and dawn.
The dew was still there. And the deliberate posing meant that the killer had done all of this for maximum effect.
This was not a crime of passion. This was deliberate.
And if you look at the scene, I think that's why it's also important to have the full scope of the crime scene pictures. It really was on display.
Like, this was not hidden behind anything. It wasn't dumped on a lot.
Like, sometimes people, like, when they do these sorts of ornate, when they do an ornate crime scene like this, it's normally where the crime happened. Look at BTK.
Look at the Boston Strangler, whether or not it was Albert DeSalvo. It's normally there.
This person brought it out and put it in an empty field. So it really looks like, unfortunately...
I mean, but when you say empty field, I want to make sure you know it's like two feet from the sidewalk. Yeah.
Like it's just there's a road, a sidewalk and two feet off of that sidewalk is the body. But it feels like a theatrical piece, like it legitimately feels like a horrible piece of art.
The way you see it walking down the way it comes like there's a little lump of a slope of a hill and then she's laying right there. it's like, it reminds me of the opening sequence of Blue Velvet.
Now, near the body was a sack used for cement containing watery bloodstains. This was almost certainly the sack used to carry the body.
It appeared, however, as if it had been carried by more than one person. Police also found a spot of watery blood on the nearby sidewalk, and a bloody footprint from a man's shoe was near the victim's head.
These, however, were the only instances of blood at the scene. Now, the only witnesses to any part of the body disposal were a neighbor and who else but the local paperboy.
I've seen some horrible things. Extra, extra, read all of my own books.

Oh, God, never read a newspaper again. You don't want to know what happens at 4 a.m.
in Los Angeles. I've seen so many horrible things.
I saw my mom punch my dad. I saw my dad punch my grandma.
I saw myself punch myself because, hey, I'm annoying as fuck. But both the paperboy and the neighbor saw a 1936 or 1937 black Ford sedan stop at the side of the body.
The neighbor said he saw it at 6.30 a.m., but the paperboy said he saw it two hours earlier at 4 a.m., meaning whoever dropped the body may have returned after the initial dump for some reason. The only other hard clue at the scene, which turned out to be nothing at all, was a men's wristwatch found in the weeds near the body.
It was considered to be a military-style watch, which, along with the victim's choice in men, would inform certain lines of investigation later on. But within an hour, Jane Doe No number one, as she was still known at that time, was placed in an aluminum coffin and taken via Hearst to the L.A.
City Morgue. Reportedly, when the coroner was told that the body had been cut in half, he requested that he be allowed to have lunch before he began the autopsy.
See, in L.A., even the fucking more guys are hilarious. Everybody's funny.

Maybe I should have a bit of lunch first.

Tune on Ryan, please.

Live from your grave.

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Excludes restaurants. The photos of the Black Dahlia crime scene are pretty hard to find on the internet these days.
But as Henry said, I have a book called Exquisite Corpse, Surrealism, and the Black Dahlia Murder that shows the whole thing in great detail. And my God, is it horrific.
I feel like it used to be everywhere. Yeah, it's very actually, I don't know how, but it kind of got scrubbed.
I think it's because of the true graphicness of the pictures, and it's hard, because they just won't show up in the Google searches. But meanwhile, like, Jodi Arias' butthole is right there.
That might be our fault, though. I guess so, but maybe.
But Jodi Arias' butthole, I guess because it's nice. And it's different, right? I guess in that way, it's different.
I mean, there's no pictures of the dude's body, right? No, no, they censor those, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's just a butthole. Yeah.
But nevertheless, in the next day's edition of the Los Angeles Examiner-Herald, photos of the corpse were published on the front page before the victim was even identified. While they did edit the photos, cleaning up the blood the blood bruises and knife cuts to the face

they did show a fair amount of mutilation and even though someone airbrushed a blanket over the body it was still a hell of a front page for 1947 but the news in los angeles in 1947 was one hell of a business it really was man these stories are great all these fucking old This is back when people were like, I don't know, man.

These made up rules.

Man, I am. business.
It really was, man. These stories are great.
All these fucking old guys, like, this is back when people

like, I don't know, man. These made

up rules, man.

I am honestly surprised that they

did that much to cover it up. It was

very brutal back then. Yeah.

You ever see, there's an old, um,

I think Sidney Lumet. Who's the guy who did something like it

hot? I think it was Sidney Lumet.

Billy Wilder. Billy Wilder.

Billy Wilder did a newsreel

about the Holocaust, and

I watched it, and it's

Thank you. I think it was Billy Wilder Billy Wilder did a newsreel about the Holocaust and I watched it and it's fucking brutal it's the worst footage I've ever seen of the Holocaust Billy Wilder? Billy Wilder and it just plays in movie theaters as children are watching it it was just like, it was terrifying have you ever seen the photographs of Ouija? No, Ouija's photographs, that's what I was going to bring up.
Ouija was a crime scene photographer in New York City, and his pictures are fucking graphic. Extraordinarily graphic.
And they were printed in the newspaper, like, every day. You had the worst gore you could possibly fucking imagine just printed in the newspaper.
And they had, like, weird, the tab were all like murder scenes too. Yeah.
Well, I also think back in the day, more people like, I think maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like from the 30s to like 20s to the 40s, like more people on an everyday basis had to like kill one of their own pets. Yeah.
Yeah. We're like, people were a little, they were a little harder edge during this time period.
A lot more people have killed people in theater of war between World War I and World War II. Yeah.
And so a lot more people have seen a lot more violence and it was a lot more normalized, I think, maybe. Absolutely.
And then life was just harder. Yeah.
So we just were kind of coddled a little bit in this day and age where we don't necessarily have to go whack a bunch of kittens because they're fucking fucking with the livestock or stuff like you had to do. I didn't have to do it.
My dad had to do it. But Prue from Great British Spakeoff, breaking show, they gave her shit because she had to drown a bunch of kittens.
And that's largely just because they do that in the UK for fun. You can't blame that.
It's a society. It's a cancel culture.
Things change. There's almost something to live for these days.
Almost.

See, before the cops even showed up at the crime scene that day,

two reporters and a photographer had arrived on the scene first.

And this was a regular occurrence with crime scenes in Los Angeles.

And one of those reporters was journalistic legend Agnes Aggie Underwood,

who plays a big part in the story of the Black Dahlia.

Sometimes I'm so competitive, I'm pee-standing enough.

That's what I do. I learn how to do it.
I can pee out my belly button.

Yeah, I'm mostly man, but I'm woman enough to smack you in the mouth.

She once smacked the editor of her paper in the face with a fish. Yeah, she's fun.
Aggie Underwood is a fun lady. Yeah, she's the prototypical tough broad.
Born in San Francisco in 1902, but she'd spent her youth in the foster care system. A relative in Los Angeles finally took her in when she was a teenager, but only so Aggie could be exploited as a possible child movie star.
Perfect. Yeah.
That was my dream. No one wanted to exploit me.
Now, Aggie settled down for a bit as a housewife with her husband, Harry, but decided one day to get a job at the Los Angeles Record working the switchboard just so she could buy a pair of silk stockings after her husband said they couldn't afford them. You mean to tell me I can't buy a pair of stockings? How am I supposed to keep these tits up for the grocery store? I'm going out and getting a job.
Before long, Aggie Underwood had worked her way from switchboard operator to reporter, and by January of 1947, Aggie Underwood was the best crime reporter on the Herald Express staff at the age of 44. She was short and sturdy, with a square jaw and a big grin, prompting her editor to say, quote, she should have been a man.
And in fact, Aggie did do her best to fit into the boys club. She refused to cover gossip or pop culture and dressed, quote, shabby and slapdash like her male co-workers, wearing no makeup and the lowest heels she could get away with.
No shoes. I don't even wipe when I go to the bathroom.
I want you to know I'm one of the guys. Just so you know, I'll fuck your wife.
You don't think I'm a man? Sit on this cigar. Yeah, come on.
Yeah, nice. Yeah, now do a little dance for me.
All right, now I got that cigar strapped to the front of me. Yeah, that's Cuba.
Well, Underwood was actually quite proud of being a true crime reporter, later saying that she was no sissy in her reaction to blood and guts. When a corpse was discovered, Aggie would usually be the first on the scene, pushing her way past beat cops trying to control their gag reflex so she could grab an ID off the body.
Wrap it up, boys. I ixnayed my gag reflex in the elementary school.
Eventually, this moxie would land her in the city editor's chair, making her one of the first women in the U.S. to have the job.
During her 17-year reign, she kept a sawed-off bat on her desk to swing at overzealous Hollywood press agents. You know, have you ever swung a sawed-off bat? No.
Oh my God. It's the best fight.
If you cut the handle off a bat and you just got the fat part of a bat, that fucker swings.

My buddy's

dad, you know, who taught us how

to fight, he always had one in his backseat

of his car. And I remember him showing us

and he was like, whoa, man, you could really

take someone out with this. He was the

same guy who gave me a cue ball

the day I got my car. He's like, keep it in your

trunk in case someone ever tries to run from you. Why are you running from me? What do I do? It implies they're running from the trunk.
And the cue ball is so you could throw it at their head. I come on the side of the head with it.
I luckily never had to use it. Today was a good day.
Well, if Aggie's newsroom was too quiet, she'd walk out of her office with a starting pistol, fire it into the air and yell, quote, Don't let this paper die on us today! Moxie! But back when Aggie was the best crime reporter at the Herald Express, she was the paper's best bulldog when it came to getting the story. And the Black Dahlia would be the biggest story of her life and the biggest story her paper ever covered.
And this is why we kind of like, I like that you chose this angle to begin the story with, like kind of talking about where the story even came from because we're people telling the story and now we get to fuck it up. Do you think that she wanted to solve it or is it just a gift that keeps on giving? No, Aggie was a fucking, she was going for it.
Aggie wanted the story no matter where the story led. And then once the story was over, it's time for the next fucking story.
Another girl will get cut in half every other week as far as I'm concerned. But this girl's mine.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. I killed a bird.
Fluoresorescent lighting's gonna ruin this business. I like lantern light! I like it's the smell of gasoline in here! Now while Aggie Underwood and the rest of the reporters who'd been on the scene that morning tried to figure out what this story was all about, the body of Jane Doe No.
1 was lying on a slab in the L.A. City morgue, about to be examined by the chief autopsy surgeon for Los Angeles County, Dr.
Frederick Newbar. So I guess I'm not ordering dessert.
I was gonna, oh, I had my salad earlier. Do you think before they cut her in half, she was called Elizabeth Tall? Come on, everybody, come on.
Milton Berle's my cousin. Well, he was discovering even more disturbing details about the body.
Although, again, we're not going to go into every single detail just yet. So no fucking emails about how we didn't talk about how fucking dilated her anus was or whatever your favorite gruesome tidbit might be.
And it was super dilated. I actually do notice that.
They dous was super dilated. But we're gonna get to it.
Don't you worry, you anus heads. She was in butt labor for some time.
It's horrible. Bad things happen to her butt.
Bad things that dudes want to do. Alright, well, I take it back.
Okay. Now, after determining the age, 15 to 20, he thought, he put the cause of death as most likely coming from one of the many blows to the head she'd suffered.
They were hard enough to kill, but not hard enough to break the skull. Next, the coroner moved on to the bisection.
A very sharp, long-bladed butcher's knife had been used to sever the body in half, cutting through the intestine, kidneys, and the soft disc between her vertebrae. Flesh had also been cut from her left thigh to remove a tattoo of a rose.
The tattoo detail was held back from the press at the time, but the Herald Express did allude to the wound in their coverage by saying a piece of flesh had been gouged out of the leg. This was most likely done after the victim was already dead.
But when the coroner moved on to the face, he concluded that the victim had been given her satanic smile, as Aggie Underwood put it, while she was still alive. Then, as a final indignation, the killer had filled the victim's stomach with feces canopy said that he didn't this is disgusting it's not that he quote-unquote it's he he filled her stomach with feces but probably fed her this feces quite possibly and they're also now kind of there's one kind of talk that might have been fertilizer.
Yeah. Was their stomach cut open? No.
Like the actual, so there was just poop in the stomach. Yes.
So it had to have been fed to her. Yeah.
Yeah. That's how it gets in mind.
Yeah. They do that thing where you eat reverse poop.
You eat like a cultured poop and it does something for your poop. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah. No, I thought you're not talking like logs.
Oh, no, I am talking logs. No, yeah, no, human shit.
You know, I'm talking about eating human shit. Full on, uncut.
Yeah, I just eat dog shit. Yeah, that's different.
That's because he likes dogs. He's a dog person.
I'm a people guy. I'm a people pleaser.
Yeah, no matter what, you know, Ed, you're always going to be, you know, simple man. I'm grossed out by human shit.
Dog shit, I could care less. You see, I flip.
He always say, oh, a dog's mouth's cleaner than yours. Not with what that dog's doing to me.
Oh, yeah. Now, once it was all said and done, and again, more details later, the coroner concluded that whoever had mutilated this corpse had some knowledge in surgery because the body was so cleanly bisected.
This, however, ran contrary to how haphazard the facial mutilation had been, leading many to speculate for years on end that there had to be at least two people involved in this murder. Why were they haphazard and the other thing wasn't haphazard? It was just cut her.
She was tortured. But it was very.
Well, that's the thing. What people didn't know for decades was that the coroner had ruled that the facial mutilation, an act of sadism, had been done before death, while the bisection, a cold act of disposal and display, had taken place after.
Definitely. You could see all of the stuff where the tattoo was cut off to help hide her identity.
Well, actually no, it wasn't. It was cut off and shoved inside her body.
It was. It was put inside of her, but I think that it was the added humiliation where it was put inside of her, but I do believe it served a purpose of it being cut off to immediately hide an identifying mark.
Possibly. Now, the mouth cuts, were they like clean or was it like brutal? They were like ragged.
So she was probably alive. She was definitely alive.
Yeah. When that was happening.
Well, the reason why people didn't know the fact about, you know, before and after was because the full autopsy report has never been made public. We only have excerpts and the LAPD's official line is that the full report on possibly the one of the I'd say top three most famous murders in Los Angeles history is forever lost.
But there are some who say that the report was lost on purpose because there may have been information contained therein that the LAPD didn't want the public to know. Release the report, Gascon.
You got two weeks left to work.

Dude, it's not even there, man. And every single time if you read people say that they have a version of it, it's all hearsay.
It's all fake. Secondhand.
But I do find it interesting. No, there's only, as far as we know, there are only four people in this world who ever read the full report.
You know, the guy who wrote it, the

head of homicide, the chief homicide detective at the time, and the two homicide detectives

who were assigned to the Elizabeth Short case.

I mean, it was back in the day when you just burned something and it's gone forever.

Well, no, they kept records explicitly. They just they specifically lost these ones.
And

it probably has to do with why we're planting a little seed here that the police might have had something to do with it blasphemy i know i know i'm the first one i can't even believe i'm saying it i pray for brian thompson's soul every day i pray he's saved you know he i think you might have to be in our next Saint episode. Yeah, he really might have to.
Now, the public's hunger for information about this case was partially fueled by the fact that in 1947, there were five major newspapers in Los Angeles. And that's just major newspapers.
That doesn't even count the small ones. This is in a city of almost two million, half the population of Los Angeles today.
And every single one of these papers were competing with each other for the latest scope concerning the murder. Incredibly, the sheer number of reporters on the streets every day scouring the city for any bit of information about any given case, they actually outnumbered the investigative force of the LAPD.
And some reporters were actually far better at homicide investigations than the cops were. Now, you might say that that's just because the reporters didn't have to follow the rules that the cops did.
But let's just say that the LAPD wasn't too fond of rules in 1947 either. This was decades before the Miranda ruling.
That, you know, Miranda rights. That was 1966.
I thought the whole Miranda ruling was that it was about being okay to be subpar on a sitcom. Whoa.
That's a sex in the city roast for no reason of Miranda. I don't know if you know why.
I don't know anything about the show. I just know that she's the weak one.
She's the one nobody likes. I think she's beautiful, but she's definitely the one.
No one wants to be Miranda. No.
I know Peloton killed Mr. Big, but I do remember.
I think that's a spoiler. Well, because there were no Miranda rights, that meant that cops routinely held people for questioning without informing them of their rights for days on end.
But because there were so many reporters, there was a constant tradeoff of information between the police and the press. But that came with a price.
A reporter often had to weigh the cost of reporting a story that might make the LAPD look bad, because negative press for the LAPD could cut off the information spigot from the cops. And that spigot is what gives them the scoops that allows them to put their newspaper ahead of everybody else.
So they get not only career wise, but monetary attention and all of it at once. But if you have a big story about the LAPD being a bunch of bastards, that can sell a lot of newspapers as well.
It can. As long as, you know,

you're paying off the cops, you can get any store you want.

Well, as long as then they all

go to jail.

They're still doing it. The dude fucking

sold Kobe's pictures, you know?

But such was

their collaboration that some reporters

were even given badges by the

L.A. County Sheriff to gain

restricted access to crime scenes.

They could also use these badges to

help themselves out when they ran afoul

I love you drive on the median for four miles, but now that I see that you have a badge, you go right on ahead, officer. But not before you kiss me on the mouth.
Do you have a license to fuck? The first reports from Aggie Underwood at the Herald Express described the killing as the act of a werewolf fiend. Those are the words she used.
And for many days afterward, the Black Dahlia murder was referred to as

a werewolf attack. I mean

of all of the murders to call a werewolf

attack. Yeah, I mean not literally of course.

They weren't saying there was a werewolf

loose in Los Angeles, but the mutilation

certainly played a number on

the imaginations of the local Angeleno.

Seems more vampire to me

because there was no blood. You know what? It could be more, it could be sort of a vampire werewolf combination.
Hanging out. They're hanging out.
That's scary. Yeah, that's scary.
I don't know. Because yeah, that's a Romeo and Juliet style.
But the story also absolutely fascinated Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Examiner edition that featured the airbrushed photos of the crime scene with the headline, Fiend Tortures Kills Girl.
That sold more editions than the one announcing Pearl Harbor. But before long, police would identify the young woman found in the vacant lot from her fingerprints, which had been wired to the FBI using an early version of the fax machine called a sound photo.
That's where they yelled descriptions of a photo through a big bullhorn. She's cutting half.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. All right.
Her right index finger looks like a bunch of spirals. Her middle right finger looks like spirals! There's shit in her stomach.
Is that helpful? Say it again. What was in her stomach? There's shit! Oh, shit! Yeah.
Some kind of shit? Doo-doo! Dookie! Within hours, the FBI linked the fingerprints to an arrest made on a girl who'd been busted for underage drinking four years earlier with a bunch of military officers at a restaurant in Santa Barbara.

The LAPD was sent a mugshot of a beautiful young girl with raven black hair.

A stunner, as the papers put it, who'd originally hailed from the Boston suburb of Medford, Massachusetts.

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. Which is where Jingle Bells was written, was in Medford, Massachusetts.
Now, she was arrested, but not the men she was drinking with. They were of age.
Yeah, they were of age. But they were drinking with a minor.
They might have also been arrested for, what do you call it, contributing to the delinquency? That's what the crime was? I don't even think even think that was a crime at the time. I think they were like, this might have made a decision that she shouldn't have made.
To the clink with you. Yeah.
Well, her name was Elizabeth Short. And reporters began finding out details about Elizabeth Short little by little as they fanned their way out from the information they could glean from her arrest in Santa Barbara.
Back in 1943, she'd been working as a clerk at Camp Cook in Lompoc, California, and once won the base's Cutie of the Week contest. Just understand that back in the day, I feel like- It's World War II.
We're in the middle of- yeah, we're in World War II here. But World War II, I think that the idea of like winning Cutie of the Week, like always leads to their death.
Like why is that? Why is that?. Why is that? Any kind of beauty queen.
There's something about saying, now that's the cutest girl that's ever. Oh, no! The background just here.
Yeah, yeah. Twin Peaks music.
She was wrapped in plastic. And some girl who's just used to being second best is now cutie of the week waiting for her.
Well, that's the thing. The second best girl ends up, that's Hillary Clinton.
Because she learns. Get bitter early.
Well, Elizabeth Short's boss at Camp Cook said that she had a childlike charm and beauty, but she was shy. But as far as she'd known, Elizabeth never smoked and rarely drank.
All she knew is that Elizabeth had disappeared in 1943 to parts unknown after a rumored sexual assault. Now, Elizabeth's father, Cleo Short, was also from Medford, Massachusetts, but lived just two miles from where Elizabeth's body was discovered in 1947.
Reportedly, he reacted coldly to the news of his daughter's death and was mostly uncooperative. Yeah, I moved here from Boston.
I don't care where my daughter is. You want some Al Pastor? Yeah, I found this dude.
It's this wonderful thing. It's called Al Pastor.
You ever had it? You ever had a taco? Yeah, Cleo was a piece of shit. He was a fucking awful man.
Yeah, her father was a was a piece of shit Well he'd actually moved to Los Angeles on his own In 1945 But hadn't seen nor spoken to Elizabeth Since she'd started working at Camp Cook Four years prior to her death He'd been an absent father in her childhood And while they had tried to reconnect in California He'd cut ties with her because he didn't approve of her lifestyle.

Back in Boston, we'd call her a whore. Yeah.
I ran away. Do not call me.
Most cruelly, though, was what a reporter from the Los Angeles Examiner did to secure details about Elizabeth Short's life. See, while the Herald Express had Aggie Underwood, the Examiner city editor was a man named Jimmy Richardson, a recovering alcoholic in his 50s who was said to be, quote, the last of the terrible men.
Yeah, I'll have a Coke. Also, bring me 20 packs of cigarettes.
Bring me the Spider-Man.

The last of the terrible men.

The last of the terrible men. And we know there's been

lots of terrible men since him.

He must have been really

terrible. Have you ever seen the picture of Jimmy

Richardson? No. He's awesome.

He looks just like, he reminds me of

J. Jonah Jameson.
Yeah. He's very similar.

Like, he's got a big cigar. He's like chomping

on a cigar and it's all just been like, a dead girl looks green to me. Richardson was a newsman without fear.
He once waged a one-man war against gangster Bugsy Siegel in the 30s. But, Jimmy Richardson was also a man without conscience who would do anything to get a story.
He had one of his crime reporters call up Phoebe May Short, Elizabeth's mother, and tell her that he was a reporter covering a beauty contest that her daughter had won, and he just needed a little more background on the bathing beauty. So the mom didn't know that her daughter was dead? No idea.
And then got this phone call? Got this phone call. Got this phone call from a reporter like, hi, this is Jim Phelps from the Los Angeles Examiner.
Guess what? Your daughter's won a beauty contest. It's a beauty contest.
It's a beauty contest. And you want to know.
And I just need to know a couple of How many sailors did she have sex with back in the day? Did your daughter have sex with a lot of sailors? Man. After the reporter gobbled up details about Elizabeth Short, happily relayed by her mother, he was ordered by Jimmy Richardson, listening on another line, to pull out the rug and tell Phoebe May that actually her daughter had been murdered and left next to the sidewalk in a vacant lot.
Comment? Let's see what happens when we take the puppy away.

Ghostbusters, too.

It was going to be like,

yeah, do it now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

God, she's sad, huh? I bet she's sad. All right.

$20. I want that.

Get the quote.

Oh, it's, ah, ah, ah, ah, oh my god,

my daughter, ah, ah, I'm so sad,

I'm so sad. How do I write crying down, Jimmy? Just write tear, tear, tear, blah, blah, ah, oh my God, my daughter.
Ah, ah, ah, I'm so sad, I'm so sad. How do I write crying down, Jimmy? Just write tear, tear, tear, blubber, blubber.
Now, what the Examiner reporters had learned was that Elizabeth was a free spirit of sorts, the third daughter of five born to a single mother. Elizabeth was also a high school dropout, dropped out her sophomore year.
Friends from Medford later described Elizabeth as a fashionable girl who was destined for a more glamorous world than the Boston suburb could offer. In other words, she was the type of girl who moved to California.
But they also described her as a bit manic-depressive. Using the parlance of the times, they said she'd be gay one minute and blue the next.
That's what happened to my father the one time he was gay. Yeah, he immediately got blue.
No, he had just got to see the fucking biker cop life, right? It was wild. But I, it's interesting, I was reading, like, got into this deep research on Elizabeth Short.
I find her story, I find her interesting, and they said there was something that she had which was called the walk that she would do this walk that people said that she'd been doing since she was like 15 or whatever and they said that it would get to the point where they they would see cars get into accidents as she walked down the street they always kind of talked about her about she was just, like, which we've said She put the bass in the walk. She did, yeah.
And there's something about this, like, you were born in Texas, you needed to get out of Texas. Yeah, and everyone knew that I needed to get out of Texas, like, to the point where they were almost rude about it.
Well, you got the walk. Yeah.
He did. And that's how they knew.
Because one of my legs is shorter than the other one. It's a bit of a stumbling block.
But Elizabeth Short was just like naturally had this. And the other words they always use for her too is natural vamp.
Yeah. They say that there was something about her always that men just flipped out over.
She was very good with guys. She like was like, I guess people talk about it.
She would sort of like in a gone girl kind of way, where she was a guy's girl. She would hang out with the guys.
She was cool in that way, but she was fashionable. She could kind of hang out with anybody.
Yes, and she was just like that. She just was a shapeshifter.
Now, Elizabeth certainly wasn't going to stay in Medford, but she also didn't have a good idea of where else to go. In her short 22 years, Elizabeth had lived in Miami, Chicago, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and a handful of other cities, with her most recent address being in San Diego.
And so after discovering where she'd most recently lived, Richardson told his crime reporter to drop everything and head to San Diego to dig up whatever he could find. But with what little information the press already had, they were painting a very negative picture of Elizabeth Short.
Nothing's changed. Hers was the fate of yet another pretty girl drawn to the promise of fame and fortune in Hollywood.
In essence, the press called her a morally bankrupt floozy who'd slept her way across Southern California. Endless reports about her supposed sexual escapades soaked the papers.
And before long, the desecrated innocent became, in the words of author Pugh Eatwell, a temptress prowling the rain-soaked streets of an urban film noir. Cool.
Yeah. Yeah, I like her then.
Why is that bad? I think that's cool. It's super cool, yeah.
But I do, yeah, I get it at the time because she would just, she did have a lot of relationships and she did kind of use guys. Well, that's the thing is that she had, I mean, we talk about, you know, like modern people being born earlier.
Like Elizabeth Short's really no different from like your average woman in 2024. Not at all.
But for 1947, she was very unique. Like she was living an unconventional lifestyle that made people very uncomfortable.
And she kind of had a little bit of a thing where she would like she liked a soldier. She'd start talking to a soldier.
Love military men. Love military

guys. I think a lot of times because they were

a little bit more. Sometimes I think

military guys on one

hand they're monsters and on the other hand sometimes they're

extra polite and extra nice. And I think

military guys fell for her very easily.

Very often she would like get

a meal out of them or a drink or something out

of them and then they'd go to sleep together

and then she'd kind of say no I don't want to.

And that was a part of what

of course at the time was like

I'm going to go ahead. a meal out of them or a drink or something out of them and then they'd go to sleep together and then she'd kind of say no I don't want to and that was a part of what of course at the time was like one of the even the worst sins than actually fucking is the oh you let a you led men on the tease the tease at the time was so much worse which is why they keep pointing toward this idea she must have done something to deserve this yeah you're either a prude a tease or a slut and you can't win no matter what you're fucked on all three yeah now this change from virgin to whore spoke to a social anxiety that was bothering southern california in particular at this point in american history inspired by portrayals of strong women in film girls were moving to la to live a life.
I mean, they wanted to live like men. They didn't want to resign themselves to the roles of domestic servants or mothers.
This, however, wasn't just a 1947 issue. The influx of young women began in the early 20th century, and by 1920, there were more women in Los Angeles than in any other city in the country, and a lot of those women had dreams of being movie stars.
For some reason, though, that those piles of women also seems to bring many legions of predators. Yes.
Author Edgar Rice Burroughs made the moral panic even worse with his 1922 novel, The Girl from Hollywood, which was about two young women who moved to hollywood but soon fell into drug addiction out of wedlock pregnancy and death for one of them elizabeth short was in short order painted as the real life girl from hollywood addicted to drugs got in a car crash got pregnant got unpregnant got re-pregnant got dead. And they would just believe they didn't even make their audition in Culver City.
Now, by some accounts, Elizabeth Short was being referred to as the Black Dahlia as early as January 17th, two days after her murder. But it actually took several weeks before that little detail came to define her entire existence.
Jimmy Richardson, the last of the terrible men, if you'll remember, said that he invented the name. I invented the name.
While Aggie Underwood claims that she invented the name. I discovered the Black Dahlia.
But in reality, the name Black Dahlia had been given to Elizabeth while she was still alive. Elizabeth had jet black hair and liked to wear it high.
And when she lived in Long Beach, she was known to frequent a drugstore wearing a black two-piece lacy bathing suit. She naturally caught the attention of the local men who began calling her the Black Dahlia, after, appropriately, a Raymond Chandler film noir that had been released the year before called the Blue Dahlia.
She liked playing into it. Very much.
She very much enjoyed Attention for Men. We'll get more detail about some of her personal relationships.
And I'm not judging on that or anything. No, not at all.
No, but there was a little bit of a shtick to it where, yes, she was a little gothy. There are some people that say that she was way more gothy than she was.
And at the time, there was sort of a redo on what they call Victorian funeral fashion. There was kind of a in pop culture that was kind of coming back up like this in terms of like kind of dressing in this gothy way is in a fashion statement.
But she also would use like this fabricated sob story quite a bit where she would tell stories of an old fiance that died. We're going to get into all these details.
And so partially it fit that character as well. But part of the reason why the name caught on in Los Angeles was that there had actually been several local murders that had been labeled with a flower.
Murders that had been covered by Aggie Underwood herself. Which is probably the reason why she did probably cement the name.

Yeah, she definitely,

I think she almost certainly

cemented the name.

One of those was

the White Carnation murder.

So named because

a white carnation

had been found on the top

of the body of a dead waitress.

Along with that,

you had the Red Hibiscus murder

and the White Gardenia murder.

Oh.

But,

put flowers on me.

You gonna come put flowers on me.

But all those

have faded into history

Look at that. But put flowers on me.
You gonna come put flowers on me? But all those have faded into history because no name had the poetry of the Black Dahlia murder. Right from your grave.
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Now, under Jimmy Richardson's direction as city editor, the Los Angeles Examiner was one of the first papers to put together a more 3D portrait of Elizabeth Short. In San Diego, at her last known address, she'd stayed with two women named Elvera and Dorothy French.
Elvera had found Elizabeth sleeping in the Aztec theater a little over a month before the murder and had invited her to stay at her home out of pity. Why Elizabeth was sleeping in the Aztec, seemingly hiding out, no one knows for sure.
That's one of those details we will get to. Also, the Aztec theater is not looking very good recently.
In San Diego or here in Los Angeles? The one in Los Angeles. No, that's the Mayan.
Oh, no, there's also the Aztec, which is a big movie theater. Oh, really? I didn't know about it.
Yeah, it's the one downtown. Yeah, it's looking real rough.
Really just came to a halt here. I'll go masturbate there later.
Yeah, good, thank you. You're not going to be alone.
Yeah, you won't be, in memory of Fred Willard. Now, Elizabeth had told Elvera and Dorothy that she'd gone to LA to be an actress, but was looking for work in San Diego in the meantime.
She also claimed that she was a recent widow. Her husband, she said, a one major Matt Gordon, had just been killed flying over India.
And she further claimed that she'd given birth to his child, but the child had also died. Now, it's hard to tell if any of this is actually true or just an exaggeration.
Elizabeth Short was admittedly a bit of a fabulist. She told stories to either garner sympathy or make herself seem more interesting.
Because she was, after all, just a fucking kid in her early 20s. What'd you do on Tumblr? What did your life look at, my 40-year-olds who used to be 22-year-olds? What did that shit look like? I remember some of y'all back in the day.
I remember some errant nipples. Well, she probably didn't have a kid because there'd be some sort of record of it.
She did not have a kid. Well, that's the thing.
Major Matt Gordon did exist. He did die over India in September of 1945.
Elizabeth Short did receive a telegram from the Major's mother informing her of his death, but the mother said that she sent telegrams to all of her son's friends as a courtesy. And there's no evidence of a marriage between Matt Gordon and Elizabeth Short, nor is there any record of her giving birth to a child.
My call is she was a lot more attached to Matt Gordon than he was to her. The mother did not want her in her son's life.
And I think that she roasted her by saying this after the fact, saying, oh, I sent notices to everybody never wanted her to be in her son's life. And then I think her son was also like, not necessarily her soulmate to him.
Like he was not, she was not his soulmate, but he was hers. Yeah.
She just happens to be the last person he was with before he went overseas. Yes.
Quite possibly. Now, these half-truths that Elizabeth told about herself make it a hell of a lot harder to figure out what was really happening in her life during this time period.
But she did tell Dorothy and Elvera that she had an inside track to Hollywood through some celebrity and was doing some work as a movie extra. That's also, we don't think, there's no record of her as a movie extra.
There is some, like, very short piece of video footage that is thought to be her, but it's just her on the street. It's not a movie.
We don't really know, and we don't really know what's going on here. This is where it's like, this is where the mystery for me comes from.
This is the unknowable person. This is the Laura Palmer of this story where you're watching this person who, everybody got a different read on her.
Everybody said that Elizabeth Short was extremely charismatic, fun to be around, like this party, but then also just got really, really, really sad. And she'd get, she'd have.
And there was just something about her. I can see her.
I don't know what it is. I can see her.
And I get what she's doing. She's a myth maker for herself.
Like, if she had made it through all this, she could have been an artist. She could have been a many, anything.
But what's known for a fact is that on some nights, a knock would come at the door of Elvera and Dorothy's home while Elizabeth was staying there. She would refuse to answer and would become terribly frightened, but would also refuse to say anything about who might be on the other side of that door.
And those for you to remember, this is up to a month before her death. To make things even more mysterious, about a week before Elizabeth's body was found, a man and a woman arrived at the house where Elizabeth was staying in a car driven by a second man.
Three people had shown up in San Diego looking for Elizabeth. But when they knocked on the door, Elizabeth got panicky and refused to answer again.
Just reminds me when they call in Mel Hall and Drive, when they call the guy with the big hat. Yeah.
She saw some shit, probably. Quite possibly.
That's one of the big theories. All Elvera and Dorothy knew was that Elizabeth suddenly wanted to leave San Diego as quickly as possible after that encounter with those three people.
And two days later, she left with a tall, red--haired freckled man in his 20s named red i'm gonna fix everything i'm creative on the name choices i give myself you know a lot of people call me brown because of what i do now but a lot of people call me red calls me head it's better because it used to just be man some guys call me guy and some people say please sir leave my child alone now jimmy richardson's crime reporter miles ahead of the police got a license plate number from red's car from a nearby motel where red and elizabeth had stayed the night before she returned to Los Angeles. The car belonged to a 25-year-old pipe clamp salesman named Robert Manley, known to his friends as Red.
On account of the hair! It's my hair! And so, Jimmy Richardson ordered his reporters to get an interview with Red Manley, the first prime suspect of the Black Dahlia murder.

Poor, poor Red Manley.

This guy's a fucking moron who signed up for the wrong, the exact wrong thing.

It goes on to ruin his life.

He had nothing to do with this whole fucking, and it's just,

what do you do when you meet Elizabeth Short?

Yeah.

Now, Manley was in San Francisco on a work trip when Jimmy Richardson's reporter showed up at his home in Huntington Park. Unfortunately for Red, the person who was home that night was his wife, who was none too pleased to be questioned about the Black Dahlia murder.
Did you see her? She was smoking. His wife? His wife was beautiful.
Like, I kind of can't, because he's like, the reason why we're doing this stupid voice for him, because he looks like Opie. Yeah, he's got the red hair and the freckles.
Yeah, he's an asshole. He's got the big flop in the ears.
He looks like a moron. But she's just this, like, his wife is hot.
That's Red Manly for you. He must have a big shalong.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know.
Maybe. Maybe? He's tall.
He's got that fucking egg-shaped head that might mean he have a big long weird foreskin penis you know what's funny is that now that you say that and i think back to all the yeah yeah yeah yeah he's probably real irish probably a boxer he's got the hottest tool disease yeah well as soon as red returned from san francisco he was ambushed and arrested by cops and reporters immediately he said quote i know why you're here but i didn't do it yep immediately first thing he said now manly wouldn't talk to the cops or the reporters who would help find him but where jimmy richardson left off aggie underwood stepped in in the most 1940 speech you could imagine she according, according to her recollection, told him, quote, Look, fella, you're in one hell of a spot. You're in a jam, and it's no secret.
If you're innocent, as you say you are, you tell the whole story. And if you haven't anything to hide, people can't help knowing you're telling the truth.
That way, you'll get it over with all at once, and it won't be kicking around to cause you more trouble.

Yeah.

Taking Aggie's advice, Manly

told his story to her first,

then repeated it over and over again to the

police. What else do I have to say?

News, movies, and I didn't know

that I'm fucked now.

She's hot. What am I supposed to do?

Look at me.

Look at me for a second.

Don't tell my wife.

Ah, fuck.

He said that he had met Elizabeth Short in San Diego the previous December,

just after he and his wife had a baby.

According to Manley, his marriage was going through an adjustment period.

Yeah, it's called his wife was healing from giving birth to your child.

So he decided to test himself with a pretty young girl to quote, I just wanted to see if I could still love my wife. That is literally what he said.
He said, I wanted to see if I still love my wife. But it turns out, yes, I do.
I certainly do. Now, he claimed that he never slept with Elizabeth Short, but they did ride around, dance, and have dinner.
They did kiss, but he said that when they did, she was, quote, kind of cold. I think it was because she was cut in half at the time.
Now, Manly left Elizabeth in San Diego after their first fling, but returned the next month on January 8th, when he offered to give her a ride back to L.A. at her request.
That night night though, before they left, they danced and had some drinks and Manley said that Short was happy until they got to the motel room. You want to make it, make it.
You want to do it upside down. You want to do it in the booty hole.
I've never done it before. I've heard people do it in France.
He said that she became sullen and silent. And when he tried making a move, she said that it was her time of the month.
Oh, yeah, you got an appointment with your oboe fixer? Luckily, my name's Red Manly. Yeah, you know how it is.
I didn't think I got that nickname. It was my hair.
I'm actually extremely allergic to period blood. And she refused to even discuss sex.
Manly said, fair enough. But the suspicious part of the story began the next day on their way back to Los Angeles.
Well, have it your way. I'll go ahead and fuck myself.
I was going to do it anyway. Maybe she was just mad because they didn't drive the two hours to Los Angeles.
And I stopped in the middle so we could blatantly try and fuck her. Well, it's because she was trying to, this is her, this is where the mysteries are, right? This is where all the big mysteries are.
So she's hanging out with him. We don't really know why she's hanging out with him.
Yeah. Like why she found, because she just went, you.
She needed a ride. Yes.
But even before that. It was before that.
Yeah. She was building him up as another.
I think that Elizabeth was in a lot of trouble and was looking for potentially. And I mean this in all generosity for somebody else to maybe catch that trouble who was not her.
Or to help her with her trouble and be ready to fucking take her to where she needs. Yeah, I don't think Red Manly would have in any way whatsoever been able to, like, take the blame for whatever it was that she had.
Oh, no. I mean, two men show up to kill me, you protect me.
Ah, maybe. And maybe somehow I get away.
Like, literally, I need cover. Maybe.
But by the time they made their way to Laguna Beach at around 5pm,m., Elizabeth got anxious, staring intently at every car that passed, straining her neck to see who the passengers were while saying almost nothing. But when they finally got to Los Angeles proper at around 6.30 p.m., Elizabeth said that she needed to go to the Biltmore Hotel to meet her sister because she was planning on returning home to Medford, Massachusetts.
Elizabeth shorts getting the fuck out of town or at least trying to. She says she's trying to to him.
Yes. And so Manley dropped Elizabeth off at the beltmore and the doorman later said that Elizabeth waited in the lobby for three hours.
Finally, she left alone at around 10 p.m. But she did make several calls.
Yeah. And that was the last reported sighting of Elizabeth Short until her body was found in Le Merit Park six days later.
Well, official sighting. Official sighting.
At least less. Credible.
Credible sighting. And she wasn't killed that night because her body would have been more decomposed.
Oh, yeah. yeah.
And then there are, quote unquote, what they call the missing week as well. We'll get into.
Now, Manley's alibi checked out easily enough. He was playing cards with his wife and friends the night of the murder.
And his wife further said that it was absurd to think her husband would kill anyone because he fainted at the sight of blood. Honestly, I get scared when I fart.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do, even thinking, cut a breast off. You don't cut a breast off.
You massage your breasts until you make a child. Well, as far as his sensational interview with Aggie Underwood went, Red Manly was quoted as saying, I'll swear on a stack of Bibles and I'll tell my minister to that on January 9th, that was the last time i ever saw betty short i did not kill her but brother i'll never cheat on my wife again and he didn't mostly because she divorced him that's how you stop that that's how you nip that in the butt get them involved in a fucking yeah one of the worst crime scenes being recorded history yeah about a year after the investigation she divorced him and he never fully recovered from being the butt.
Get them involved in a fucking, one of the worst crime scenes in recorded history. Yeah, about a year after the investigation, she divorced him.
And he never fully recovered from being the first suspect in the Black Dahlia case. Suffered numerous nervous breakdowns as a result.
Yeah, he was like in an insane asylum. He had to be put away for a little while.
Yeah. It ruined his life.
It did. Already pretty fragile as it was, it seems.
Didn't know I was hanging on by a thread, I was.

But what was strange about Red Manley

was what happened to Aggie Underwood

just after her interview was published.

Aggie, the best true crime reporter the Herald Examiner had,

was pulled off the case without explanation.

Well, in response to getting taken off,

Aggie sat in her editor's office and did an embroidery for hours until she was put back on the story. You see what I'm making? It's a set of balls.
I'm running out of pink. Says home is where the nuts are.
And she soon after uncovered an interesting link between Elizabeth Short and another murder that had occurred about two and a half years prior. On October 12, 1944, a woman named Georgette Bauerdorf was found murdered in the bathtub of her West Hollywood apartment, raped, beaten, and asphyxiated.
A military badge was stuffed in her mouth, which led the L.A. Sheriff's Department to believe she was killed by a military man.
Yeah. Good job, fellas.
The thing, though, is that, or did somebody that wants you to think it's a military? Yes. Yes.
Furthermore, Bauerdorf was a junior hostess at a club called the Hollywood Canteen, known to be frequented by men in the military.

And who else should be working the same job at the same club

at the same time as Bowerdorf but Elizabeth Short?

Dude, just like all the girls in Twin Peaks worked at Two Wide Jacks.

Yeah.

Believing it to be too much of a coincidence,

Aggie published an article linking the two murders

with the incredible headline, Werewolves leave trail of women murder victims in Los Angeles. Now, Georgette's diary had been confiscated by the LAPD after she'd been murdered.
And it was discovered upon Second Look that there were quite a few entries about Elizabeth Short and the time the two girls had spent working at the Hollywood canteen. Laura Palmer's fucking diary.
Yes. Of most interest was their relationship to a then well-known actor named Arthur Lake.
Arthur Lake had played Dagwood in a series of 28 movies based on the comic strip Blondie between 1938 and 1950. Lake was known for playing light romantic roles, but was always a bit of a mama's boy.
Hardly a werewolf type. Yeah, he looks like a fucking cholo, if you see his face.
He's got a goofy face. He's got sort of a sad sack look.
And the fact that he does sort of look like Dagwood. He looks exactly like Dagwood, yeah.
Lake was also good friends with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, Patty Hearst's grandfather.

Welcome back to the show.

Yeah, dude.

They're all like, think about it. These are the connections.
So this is before Patty Hearst. This is all, it all runs together.
It's 1947, yeah. Yeah.
And it just so happened that Aggie Underwood's newspaper was one of the many newspapers that William Randolph Hearst owned. So with one quick phone call from Hearst, from Hearst mistress,

any investigation into Arthur Lake,

Georgette Bowerdorf and Elizabeth Short was quickly nipped in the bud.

Although there are no serious theories

that say that fucking Dagwood

murdered the Black Dahlia.

Except we'll look at,

I mean, actors,

especially back in the day,

some of these guys were,

there was some cryptic shit going on.

Have you ever read Hollywood and Babylon or Hollywood Babylon 2? Any of the Kenneth Anger stuff? I know a lot of it is completely exaggerated. Sure.
But these guys did some fucked up shit. If you look at, you know, we talked about Errol Flynn.
Yeah. There was a lot of weird shit.
Yeah. but just because Arthur Lake wasn't involved that didn't mean there wasn't a connection

between the murders of Georgette Bauerdorf and Elizabeth Short, even considering that Georgette's murder was nowhere near as violent or performative as Elizabeth's. Yeah.
Where does Elizabeth's murder come from? Yeah. Is that really the first time somebody ever kills somebody? Do they produce the Black Dahlia? I don't think so, but...
No, it's just the way it was done. Yeah, I mean, you'd think it would be definitely a...
You'd think it'd be a huge ramp up. But Aggie never got to find out anything about these connections because the moment she started looking into this link, she was taken off the story a second time.
Except on this occasion, it was because she was promoted to city editor of the Herald Express. And that's how you always get, if you have a problem and you want to get rid of it and you got a way to get, to promote them out, that's the best way to do it.
Because it shuts them the fuck up. I mean, she was a deserving candidate.
Oh yeah. But everyone thought it was strange that the only reporter making real progress at their paper on the biggest news story of the decade was reassigned twice without explanation.
So this kind of points to mafia, probably. Don't know, Eddie! Don't know! But Aggie took the job, and the story more or less went back to Jimmy Richardson.
Now, besides the black sedan that had been spotted at the murder scene in the wee hours before Elizabeth Short's body was found, there really weren't any concrete leads as to who was responsible for Elizabeth Short's murder. But on January 23rd, the phone rang at the office of the Los Angeles Examiner, and it was Jimmy Richardson who answered.
Hello! God damn it, who is it? Why are you calling me?

On the other end of the phone was a man with a voice that has been described again and again as soft and sly.

He was asking for the city editor.

Jimmy said, speaking.

And so the soft voice replied,

Well, Mr. Richardson, I must congratulate you on what the examiner has done in the Black Dahlia case.
You seem to have run out of material. Maybe I can be of assistance.
And so, after Jimmy very matter-of-factly said, we need it, the soft voice said, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll send you some of the things she had with her when she, shall we say, disappeared.
Immediately, Jimmy wrote the words, Trace this call, on a piece of paper and handed it to his assistant, who jiggled the receiver arm on Jimmy's telephone to get the attention of the switchboard girl. The soft voice went on to say that he had Elizabeth's address book, her birth certificate, and a few other items that she had in her handbag.
When Jimmy asked when they could expect these items, the soft voice said, Oh, within the next day or so. See how far you can get with them.
And now I must say goodbye. You may be trying to trace this call.
Flabbergasted, Jimmy sat back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and said, I think I might have been talking to the killer of the Dahlia.

And sure enough, two days later, a package arrived at the examiner's office postmarked January 24th, the day after Jimmy Richardson had gotten the call.

Written on the front of the package and words clipped from newspapers and magazines was this.

Here's the Dahlia's belongings. Letter to follow.
And inside, among other things, was Elizabeth Short's birth certificate, social security card, and a baggage claim check for two suitcases and a hat box at a local Greyhound station. But most important was a brown leather notebook filled with names and numbers, what appeared to be Elizabeth Short's address book.

Strangely, the name Mark Hansen was printed on the front,

and believe you me,

we'll be getting into Mr. Hansen on the next episode.

But even more strange was the fact

that several pages had been cut out of the book,

meaning that it was possible that whoever sent it

didn't want the reporters or the police

to have certain bits of information. Like their name.
Yes. Oh, yeah.
But lest the police get too excited, the entire package had been soaked in gasoline, which meant that there were no usable fingerprints on anything that was inside or outside of the envelope. That was true freedom back in the day that you could just mail a package soaked in gasoline.
postman whistling i'm liking this package you don't like smell the hell out of it four days later though the promised letter to follow arrived at the examiner this time it was a handwritten message and very short it said quote here it is turning in wednesday january 29th 10 a.m my phone at police. Black Dahlia Avenger.
Now the cops awaited January 29th like it was Christmas Day, and they couldn't wait to find out what the fuck Black Dahlia Avenger meant. Oh, they're very excited.
I would be if I was a police officer during this time period. Oh my God, I can't win again, win again, win.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They figured it was probably in reference to some sort of wrong that Elizabeth Short had committed,

either real or imagined, that the person who had killed her had avenged something.

But once January 29th came, they thought that they were going to find out for sure.

But January 29th came and went.

The next day, another postcard arrived at the examiner,

this time returning to the cut-and-paste method.

It said, quote, Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal.
Another postcard arrived at the examiner, this time returning to the cut-and-paste method.

It said, quote,

Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal.
Dahlia killing was justified.

And after that missive, the newspapers in Los Angeles and the offices of the LAPD were flooded with letters and postcards,

supposedly from this black Dahlia Avenger, making it impossible to tell what was real and what was a hoax. I wonder if the actual Jack the Ripper has any idea what he did.
Yeah, what he started. Yeah, like the fact that this is all tied back and it's all been the same.
They've been doing this shtick ever since because of him. This guy, the Zodiac, BTK.
It's very interesting. I'll always like, ah, it's fascinating.
I like it when they yell at the police. The false leads overwhelmed the investigation on both sides.
And while there were four viable fingerprints taken from the second postcard, it was believed by the FBI that only the first package and the first postcard were from the actual killer. Although they may also have their reasons for holding that opinion.
From there, though, the police had to contend with a mountain of what they called Confessing Sams. These were men and women who didn't do the crime, but wanted to take credit for the murder anyway.
And that's important to remember throughout this whole series is how people fucked up as it is. We've seen it with John Bonet Ramsey.
We've seen it with, like, people want to be attached to the story because it gives them some meaning. And so we're going to see a lot of that.
It was interesting, though, that at least one confessing Sam got attached to another brutal murder. Just a few weeks after Elizabeth Short was killed, another woman, a 45-year-old pilot, army nurse, and bit player named Jean French, was found beaten and stomped to death on the corner of Grandview and Indianapolis Avenue.
On her torso, someone had written a message in lipstick. Fuck you, BD.
Presumably, fuck you, Black Dahlia. Which doesn't really make sense.
Nope. Because it's like, what are you mad about? To be honest, it sounds like it could be...
They said it could also be Fuck You BP, but it could, you know, who knows? It could be anything, but it was either BP or... Bunky Pepperton.
Yeah, exactly. The blind dancing boy that was a part of all of the biggest hits on the Los Angeles Broadway at the time.
Where the whole thing was that people would lie to him where the stage was. And everyone would follow him around and see him be the tap dancing.
And he was the one who, his favorite song, All the World's a Stage. I just wish I could see it.
I love that guy. It could just be like, fuck you, Big Dick, too.
It could be anything. It could be anything at all.
BD was not, I don't think big dick energy was a thing at the time. Yeah.
Also, the crime, the killing of Jean French, also unsolved to this day. The cops believed at the time that Jean French had been murdered in a rage by the Black Dahlia killer because two days earlier, the Herald Express had declared that a man named Joseph Dume, who would spend years confessing and recanting about Black Dahlia, was the man who murdered her.
The LAPD went back on the link between French and short, but they still had to contend with over 500 confessing Sams, each of whom had to be thoroughly checked out just in case they were telling the truth. That's crazy.
Oh, yeah. 500.
500 is such a ridiculous number.

And they have to track each one down.

Because of them, the person probably got away.

Oh, yes.

And almost you wonder if some of them were written by the people that were surrounding the investigation and all of that.

No idea.

Now, some of these confessing Sams were led by the press and public opinion to create fantastical stories that were nowhere near the truth.

See you next time. of that.
No idea. Now, some of these confessing Sams were led by the press and public opinion to create fantastical stories that were nowhere near the truth.
See, for a time, it was speculated that Elizabeth Short was gay because she was sometimes known to be in the company of, quote, bossy blondes and women with Amazonian proportions. Call me a lesbian.
Sign me up, during her missing week, she was seen several times with a woman, a very Amazonian blonde woman, another small brown-haired woman with a lot of makeup. Now, the gay angle was, of course, salacious, but it also served to further smear Elizabeth Short, because while male homosexuality in Hollywood in the 1940s was condemned, lesbianism was actually seen as the far greater sin and the bigger perversion.
Because I think some guys in many ways like were almost jealous of homosexuality because that's two dicks and two penises, the most powerful things that could be in a room having sex with each other. And that's like what's hard for people to understand.
It's like I was like they have to wrap. they have to kind of put that aside because it's like, two penises, that's awesome.
That's two men. That's men.
Those are men making decisions. Those are businessmen, policemen, officers.
You know what I mean? There's a dick going into a hole. I can grasp that.
And there's a dick on the other side of that hole that's his own dick. Also, it's just two less dudes trying to fuck my wife.
Yes. Meanwhile, lesbians show they don't need dick.
Yeah. And that's not.
It's powerful. Yep.
Well, that's what they don't like about it. Well, it was said that gay women dressed in men's clothing to trick innocent young girls into horrifying sadistic situations just like the Black Dahlia murder.
And a reporter at The Examiner was particularly sure that the murderer was a disgruntled lesbian. I think a lot of times they just make angry guitar music.
These were men trapped in women's bodies, they said. Neurotic, tragic, absurd, and dangerous.
And it seemed like this story was actually going to play out when a woman named Christine Reynolds confessed to Elizabeth's murder. Reynolds said that she'd met Elizabeth at a gay bar called the Crown Jewel on January 9th, and it killed her soon after, using some of the worst details about the mutilation that had been held back from the public as proof.
Namely, Christine had said after the murder of Elizabeth Short, she had, quote, cut some of her goddamn hair off and shoved it up her fucking pussy. And the thing was, this did happen.
The killer did cut off a piece of skin from Elizabeth Short's pubic area before forcing it into her vagina after her death. But when Christine Reynolds was further interrogated, it was found that she had a girlfriend who worked for the LAPD who had told her all the gory details about the mutilation that had been withheld from the public.
Nevertheless, the lesbian angle continued to be pushed for years. Now, was she big? Would she be able to carry the body? You know, like that's...
I mean, who knows?

But I mean, all of this, you know, came and went in the course of a couple hours.

Yeah.

You know, like she gets put in the box and starts confessing.

And one of the big tricks that they used with these confessing Sams was the hair color.

Yes. Because everyone sort of assumed that when Elizabeth Short was killed that she still had her like famous raven black hair.
But no, she'd actually dyed it using henna really like pretty recently before. So her hair when she was killed was actually kind of a reddish light brown.
Okay. Yeah.
So if they didn't know that detail, then it was like, okay, you're definitely, you definitely aren't the person who killed her. And what happens to you if you're confessing Sam? Do you go to jail still? No, they say, get out of here.
Yeah, so if they didn't know that detail, then it was like, okay, you definitely aren't the person who killed her.

And what happens to you if you're confessing, Sam? Do you go to jail still? No, they just say, get out of here. Yeah, they just get mad.
Now there are punishments for it. Yeah, obstruction of justice.
Obstruction of justice, you can't, but at the time they'd just be like, get the fuck out of here. Probably beat them a little bit.
Probably. I mean, man, they beat fucking everybody.
They beat everybody. They used to have, I was talking about reading about the LAPD

at the time was like, they would

talk and investigate

new ways to beat

people without them leaving

physical marks. What were those things?

Billy Jacks or whatever? Yeah, yeah. Black Jacks.

Yeah, leather with a piece of

lead in it. And they also would use

rubber hoses.

Oh, yeah. Oh, that's where that? Yep.
I'll beat you with a rubber hose. Yeah.
Oh, okay. Well, now I know.
Now, the man who was responsible for sifting through all the Confessing Sam stories to maybe find the real killer was also the only guy in Los Angeles who seemed to have a real hook on who the Black Dahlia killer might be. That man was Dr.
Joseph Paul DeRiver. DeRiver! He was a psychiatrist who worked for the Los Angeles Police Department.
He's an interesting guy. He is interesting.
And there, of course, some people say that he's completely discredited because he made up his job, but, you know, it's the 1930s. Somebody's got to make up the job.
We made up our job, and people sometimes call us as experts. That's what's hilarious.
It's the same thing. I've had people ask me like legit professors or police officers ask me questions about crime and it's like oh you fucking don't know.
You got bamboozled son. I have to learn from Yeah, yeah.
I made this up. I made up this job.

This is a job we created. Now, because

of the public display of the body and

the Black Dahlia Avenger communications,

DeRiver was convinced that the

murderer would continue to interact

with the public. Yes.
So,

if someone wanted to talk, DeRiver

would listen. Because DeRiver

had already danced to this song once before.

I love murder. Nah, it's my passion.
Criminals are my passion. Sex crimes my instrument.
I love it every second of it and goddammit I can't get enough of it. I like to be up to my pierced eyebrows and little girl jasm.
See, in 1937 he'd worked a case called The Babes of Inglewood. It's now lost to time, but before the Black Dahlia, it was the most disturbing set of homicides the city had yet seen.
In this case, three little girls, ages 7, 8, and 9, were found raped and strangled to death in a gully in Baldwin Hills. Going just off the way the bodies were positioned, and fact that their shoes had been removed and placed next to them, DeRiver deduced that the killer was a sadistic pedophile in his 20s who was meticulous in his appearance, he was religious, and he was remorseful.
And he's standing right there! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! I'm sorry! It's hardly a bigger story. Yeah, it's a huge story, yeah.
And now, like, actually, I found some information about it, but, you know, there's no fucking Wikipedia page about the babes of Inglewood. Well, police soon found something very close to that in a 32-year-old crossing guard named Albert Dyer, who said he lured the girls to the park with a story about rabbits.
He then separated, raped, and strangled them one by one before preying over each corpse. DeRiver's mostly accurate profile was among the first to ever lead to the capture of a killer in Los Angeles.
So DeRiver became a sort of star expert thereafter. He also established the LAPD's Sexual Offense Bureau, which led to the California Sexual Offender Registry that was created partly because of the Black Dahlia murder.
But like all of it, because like there was a little bit of discrepancy, I believe, about Albert Dyer, because they said that he might have been too simple to understand. Yeah.
And they said that because he was mentally handicapped and they started talking and asking him a bunch of questions and he'd give him a bunch of opposite answers. And they're not quite certain maybe in the end he was real and then the worst part about creating the california sexual offender register was that it then being used as a massive tool yeah evil yes it was used to criminalize lgbt people like it was basically used as like a gay list you know uh and that was used mostly during the sex crime panic of the 40s and 50s but de river's actual target with this registry was sexual psychopaths like the man who had killed elizabeth short de river believed that particularly nasty sex offenders should be castrated tattooed on the forehead and get their ears clipped to a sharp peak so children could easily identify it's're going to make them terrifying? Yeah.

One of our researchers put it, it's like he wanted to turn them into actual goblins.

I think there's a couple of them who's like,

I'll do that anyway.

Thank you. For free?

Oh, the government's

paying for this?

But even though some of his

ideas were fucking insane,

DeRiver was the one who found the man who might be the key to the entire Elizabeth short mystery. See, as was demonstrated by Elizabeth's paranoid behavior in the time just before her disappearance, it just might be that she got herself mixed up with some unsavory characters during her time in Los Angeles.
These unsavory characters were the men who ran the city's underground. Men who had the power to not only cover up one of the most famous murders in history, but to eventually derail an indictment that would have almost certainly resulted in a trial that could have introduced a lot of uncomfortable questions.
And it's with these men, those questions and the the world where all this happened that we'll return to the Black Dahlia murder next week. Call me.
Dial your number. Go ahead.
I told you I was here. You invited me.
It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted. I love the Lost Highway, man.
Now realize we lost highway. All of this shit fucking, I don't know why this stuff creeps me out.
Yeah, man. Because I think that as we get deeper into Elizabeth Short's story, and you see more and more of like, the reason why this really hits the David Lynch vibe more than anything, besides the fact that he told the story about how he got hit up by a police officer when later on in life, and David Lynch got, he said, he's like, I got something to show you, something that you'd really want to see.
And David Lynch is, all right. And then they got dinner at Musso and Franks.
This is according to David Lynch. And he said they had dinner, and they talked about stuff, and he was like, at the end, the police officer looked at David Lynch and said, so you're into the Black Dahlia case.

And David Lynch is like, it's sort of the cornerstone of a lot of my work.

And he's like, I want you to tell me what you think of this.

And reached into a case and he pulled out a picture of the body of Elizabeth Short lying in the grass.

And David Lynch said that he was in front of him. He said he looked at he says he looked at it for 10 minutes.
He'd never seen it before. He'd never seen it before.
It was a new picture of the Black Dahlia body. And then he took it away.
And it wasn't until he was at home later on that night that he said, what was the difference? What's wrong with that picture? And he was like, it was at night. The body was not found until the morning.
Whoa. And it wasn't photographed until about 11 a.m.
Yeah, that is his, so David Lynch has got this, so this whole thing is so fucking mysterious and we just started it. Yeah.
So it seems to me like there's a person who ever did it probably killed a bunch of other people. Maybe.
If they were very romantic about it and taking photos of their work and shit. Maybe.
Or otherwise, just be trying to get away with it. I don't know.
I don't know. Or it's just one of those where we don't know what patch of grass was in.
It's just, I love this, I fucking love this shit. Yeah.
There's a lot, I mean, there's a million theories about who may have done it, why, the motivations. Like, you can, for every argument you could make, there are six arguments you can make against it.
And that's what's awesome. Like, yeah.
I mean, I guarantee you there are people that just because I said the name Dr. Joseph DeRiver have discredited every single thing that I've said before or after.
Yeah, sure, sure. Like, just because you even mentioned Joseph DeRiver because in their theory, in their world,

they must remove Joseph

DeRiver from the picture

completely for their theory to be true.

But that's why we're going to go through as many of the theories

as we can. Yeah, we're going to go through

a fair amount of them. Like, next week,

we're really going to be getting into some of the other theories,

some of the really interesting things, some of the stuff

that does have to do that relates to the art

world, you know, some of the stuff that relates

to the cops. And then on episode

three, we're really going to get into the theory as to who personally I think is the best suspect and why. We're going to talk about some of those sweet men you mentioned earlier.
Yes, those very sweet men. Unsavory.
Unsavory men. Unsavory, yes.
And you can go to patreon.com slash lastpodcast. You can watch us yell about this.
You can also go and see us live on our stream. 600 episodes of this shit.
God damn. Technically, I do believe with all the numbers all together, it's probably like 645.
I think it's actually more. I think we're getting pretty close to 650 at this point.
But guess what, man? We make the fucking rules. Yeah.
And that's what it's like. And that's the problem when the newspapers go rogue, because then they make reality, which is what we just did by changing our numbers.
We can do whatever we want. And we go to lastpodcastandlove.com.
Go see us live. That's right.
We got Atlanta coming up. It's going to be so much fun.
The Coca-Cola Roxy. Big ass space.
So come and check us out there. And after that, we got, what's after that? We got Dallas in February.
We got the Ryman Auditorium in March. Detroit in April, right before 420.
That's going to be a lot of fun. I don't want to get stuck in Michigan on 420, by the way.
Oh, dude, we're going to bring our own stuff, too. What's the 420 version of Devil's Night?

Ooh.

419.

Go to sleep night.

Everybody goes, everybody smokes weed and watch Great British Baking Show until they fall asleep.

Of course, Toronto is also this next year.

That's on May 3rd.

Don't forget to buy your tickets to that.

It's at the Elgin Theater.

Yes.

Yes.

And so, Hail Satan. Do your best to not be It's at the Elgin Theater.
And so Hail Satan,

do your best

to not be Black Dahlia'd

this week. Try.
You know what I mean?

Yeah, hell game everyone. But also at the same time, be

free. Yeah.
Don't let that

make you afraid. No.
Be free.

Like Elizabeth Short,

but not just like her.

You know, because obviously you don't want the same result,

but she was free. Hale has been short

she seems like a really cool person

she's got her moments

and I would have thrown it all away for her

you really would have

she would have fucking destroyed you

exactly my type

I would have hired her to be a bartender at my restaurant

yes

goodbye

bye